Concluding Remarks
at a Symposium on

Uncommon Opportunities: A Road for Employment, Food, and Global Security

New Delhi, India,
November 20-22, 2004

You have
asked me, possibly because I am the oldest participant, to offer some remarks
at the conclusion of this remarkable symposium. My age is, in a way,
relevant: I have been actively involved, sometime during a long life, in each
of the fields we have been discussing these last three days.

As a U.S.
public executive, I was once active in the diplomacy of arms control and
disarmament. I have several times been responsible for helping programs of
economic and social development, in societies as different as Italy and
China. When it comes to food, I’ll cheerfully concede that I have been more an
appreciative consumer than an ardent producer – though my first job in a long
life of public service was in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. I was
working then – in the late 1930s -- to help our poorest farmers get the benefits
promised them by President Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Peace and Security

I will
start, as our conference did, with the security issues brilliantly explored
for us by Air Commodore Jasjit Singh. He rightly questioned the premises of
the “war on terror.” I will be less polite than he was.

That very
phrase is an oxymoron. Terrorism is not a doctrine, like President
Harry Truman’s declaration that the U.S would protect Greece and Turkey from
Soviet takeover. It’s not a purpose, like the postwar recovery of Western
Europe assisted by the four-year Marshall Plan, a great drama in which I was
lucky to play a part. It’s not even a deadly disease like AIDS or a chronic
condition like poverty, on which metaphorical wars have been declared.

No, terrorism
is a tool – “a tool, not an actor,” as one diplomat puts it. It’s a
tool often used in history. Terrorism is usually violent action, often aimed
at a few of the innocent in order to terrify some much larger population. The
violence has traditionally been directed, by the weaker and less organized,
against the stronger and more “established.” It has often been aimed by people
who got there first, against other people who came later to muscle the
early-arrivers aside: colonial subjects against imperial powers, people of
color against dominant whites.

Terror has
also, and often, been used as an instrument of governance. But history is
mostly written by the winners, so the “downs” are more often called
“terrorists” or worse, the “ups” skipping lightly over their own use of terror
tactics as tools for governing. Either way, terrorism will doubtless be a
feature of world history during the rest of this century and beyond.

A terrorist
conspiracy that could launch so major an attack on the United States as occurred
on September 11, 2001, was bound to provoke a warlike response. The attackers
weren’t a state, but they were hosted and shielded by a (failing) state.
Declaring “war” on Afghanistan, supplanting the Taliban, and trying to prevent
the country from serving as a sanctuary for an organized nonstate called al
Qaeda, were necessary – though obviously not sufficient – reactions to the 9/11
attack.

But a war
against terrorism? That’s a promise to destroy anyone anywhere who
tires of opposing established power by eloquent words and nonviolent deeds, and
decides instead to use the tool called terror to advocate change. A war on
terrorism has no end-game; it’s a permanent engagement against an always
available tool.

So a war on
terrorism can never be definitively “won.” The slaughter of innocents in
high-minded desperation will always be an option for persuasive and imaginative
leaders. But the practice of terrorism provokes its own backlash, so the
terrorists don’t win either.

Terrorism by its nature won’t be eradicated or abolished. But a broad
cooperative international effort, robust and resolute, using all the
capabilities of modern human and electronic intelligence, can contain it,
isolate it, fragment it, reduce it to criminal behavior that can be
internationally policed.

Moreover, the swamp of poverty, unemployment, and desperation in which
terrorism thrives can be drained by getting much more serious about economic and
social development. This is the point Jasjit Singh drove home so forcefully in
his paper for this conference, in his emphasis on a constructive response to
the revolution of rising expectations. The tensions in this pervasive
revolution can be exacerbated by terrorist acts, or reduced by opportunities
for full employment – as the Government of India has recognized by proposing a
doctrine of guaranteed employment.

“Jobs
or jihad” -- that seems to be the choice. And this led us to our second day
discussion of “job-led growth.”

Meanwhile, the issue of nuclear disarmament was put to this
conference both by Jasjit Singh and by Admiral Ramdas, who proposed that India
“convene a meeting of all nuclear weapon capable states . . . without any fixed
agenda other than to agree to discuss all aspects of the nuclear question.”
“Nothing substantial,” in his judgment, has come out of six decades of talk
about nuclear proliferation and nuclear disarmament. His idea was to “evolve a
new workable nuclear management regime” to think hard about “nuclear
disasters, nuclear accidents and other such unforeseen events so as to mobilize
resources for meeting such contingencies.”

I would
be even more ambitious for such an Indian initiative. The very size of
explosions made possible by splitting the atom – which couldn’t be split, my
secondary-school physics teacher assured me in the 1930s – makes them a
militarily unusable weapon, except for deterring their use by another. If the
nuclear weapons states, including the United States, could agree to forswear
such weaponry, the way would be open for some practical “next steps” such as
those I proposed about the time the International Commission on Peace and Food
was writing its excellent report.

For
example: If the agreed goal were true nuclear disarmament, two preliminary
actions in the United Nations Security Council – (1) to mandate an international
agency to destroy more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons and (2) to
declare any nuclear use a punishable act against civilization – would move the
world much faster toward nuclear common sense.

Jobs-led Growth

We were
privileged to listen to Prime Minister Manmoham Singh’s opening address at the
Indira Gandhi Conference which started just before ours this week. I found it
refreshingly full of economic common sense. He stressed a “policy framework
which rewards entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity,” and the need to
“ignite a new revolution of creativity and enterprise in the rural areas.” He
made clear that building “a knowledge-based economy” was both a loftier and a
more difficult aim “than just creating information technology capabilities.”
India, he said, is “already the world’s largest multi-cultural,
multi-religious, multi-linguistic democracy” – and may in a decade be the
world’s most populous nation.

The Prime
Minister also called for politics to “rediscover its role as a purposeful
instrument for the management of social change and not merely a ticket for
power. India 2015,” he concluded, “will be a nation of capable and empowered
men and women, well-fed and gainfully employed, modern and rational and
actively engaged with the world.”

The following
day, our own conference was graced with an equally uplifting opening address by
the President of India, Dr. A.P.D. Abdul Kalam, who made good use of highly
professional PowerPoint displays on a large screen. He regards 2004 as a most
uncommon moment in India’s history: “all at a time, an ascending economic
trajectory, continuously rising foreign exchange reserve, global recognition
of technological competence, energy of 540 million youth, umbilical
connectivities of 20 million people of Indian origin in various parts of the
planet, and the interest shown by many developed countries to invest in our
engineers and scientists . . . .”

He spoke of the
Second Green Revolution as having “the farmers in focus, farming technology as
the friend, food processing and marketing as partners and the consumers as
angels to be satisfied.” He predicted national growth rates of “7 to 8
percent,” an increase in grain production “to around 400 million tonnes” on
less land with less water, with due attention to “ecological balance” – all
this “to be achieved through information access to all stakeholders and not
with central controls or restriction of movement of agricultural products.” He
put special emphasis on “connectivity” -- physical, electronic, and “knowledge
connectivity through education.”

Toward the end
of his address the President also spoke of rising expectations as central to the
future of developing countries. He quoted a management expert: “The real
source of market promise is not the wealthy few in the developing world, or
even the emerging middle-income consumers. It is the billions of aspiring poor
who are joining the market economy for the first time.”

After the
President’s address, and still thinking about the Prime Minister’s the day
before, I opened my notebook and wrote a note to myself: “There surely is no
other country in the world, large or small, that is so blessed as to be led by
a forward-looking economist and a humanistic scientist. Opening conference
sessions, of which I have experienced more than my share, are likely to be
boringly conventional. But I have just heard, from the two leaders of the new
India, two lucid evocations of an exciting yet realistic future.”

The notion of
“jobs-led growth” was already central to the 1994 Report of the International
Commission on Peace and Food. That theme is only reinforced by the way India,
and the world it is increasingly a part of, has mutated during the past decade.

A centerpiece
of the International Commission’s Report was “the assertion that
employment must be recognized as a fundamental human right, the economic
equivalent of the right to vote. . . .[A]ccess to gainful employment constitutes
the economic franchise that lends legitimacy and functionality to a market
economy.”

In their
hard-hitting and clearly written Preface to the Second Edition of “Uncommon
Opportunities,” the ICPF Report, Dr. M.S. Swaminathan and Garry Jacobs note
that the Indian Government has “proclaimed their recognition of this right and
their commitment to enforce it through an act of parliament.” Our
many-sponsored meeting this weekend was designed “to review the technological
and policy instruments now available to fulfil the human quest for ‘education,
health, food, water, and work for all and forever’.”

The vision was
ambitious because the task is huge. Without neglecting India’s more highly
organized manufacturing and service sectors, our discussion focused especially
on agriculture and its spinoffs in processing and other agribusiness, on skill
development, and on energy. To uplift the “unorganized,” “informal” sector
which is most of India’s economy, crucial roles were recognized for self-help
groups, the spread of microfinance systems, and dispersed leadership. Such a
framework requires, as the President had said, “information access to all
stakeholders.” In such a system “planning” is not done by a few planners far
from the farms and villages. Planning is improvisation by the many on a shared
vision – a vision which is shared because the many have been widely consulted
about it by the few who announce it.

In the
“informal sector,” women often play a key role. Receiving most of the
microloans, they learn to become entrepreneurs. Where there are obstacles to
the recognition and entitlement of women, these will need to be removed.
Education and vocational training were repeatedly stressed, these past two
days, by participants who saw clearly that the highest value-added investment
will always be in people – not only in their constantly changing skills but in
knowledge and understanding of the context of their work and their motivation
and enterprise to adapt to continuous technological change.

“From this
perspective,” the authors of the new Preface wrote, “the single most important
agent of human development is not the institutions of government or those of
private enterprise. It is the educational system that imparts to future
generations the accumulated knowledge, skill, and capacity acquired in the
past. The quality of that education will determine the quality of the human
beings who build our future world.” As a sometime educator, I thoroughly
agree. But I would put a growing emphasis on the need for lifelong learning in
a world where technological change keeps changing the rules and enhancing the
opportunities.

India’s Exciting Future

Let me speak
now as an American who has had too few occasions to visit your vast and
wonderful country, and is grateful for these few illuminating days with you.
I want to testify how exciting it is to be a witness and in some small way a
participant as India glides down the runway at a moment that some development
economists call “take-off.”

The puzzles and
challenges ahead of you are all too obvious. There is your sheer size – a
billion people and counting, more than 600,000 villages and dozens of
fast-growing cities. Even an observer from the United States of America,
which we consider a large country, is stunned by the scale of your democracy,
its problems and its prospects. How will you get everybody in on the act and
still get some action?

Then there are
your hierarchical traditions, some from long ago and some inherited from your
recent colonial past, which will need to be adapted to the “horizontal,”
consensual, processes that the information revolution seems to require. There
is still clearly what in our politics would be called a “gender gap,” an issue
about the status of women -- even though some women in India have achieved
higher political office than has yet been possible for women in the United
States.

India has
cultural and religious dissonances that inevitably render it awkward to make
this vast country “safe for diversity.” You share with us Americans all the
political complexities that are inherent in a federal system of government,
compounded in your case by tribal, ethnic, and religious divisions that make
elusive the “unity in diversity” for which both India and the United States are
intermittently striving. A “polycentric” world we both foresee; but we both
have to find also in our domestic politics the balance that makes diversity
compatible with unity.

And yet . . .
the positive signs are also there, for even a short-time visitor to see. The
scale of India’s challenges is enormous, but India’s very size compels global
attention, guarantees global impact, requires that India play a role on the
world’s stage, not just as a “regional power.” India’s status as the world’s
largest multi-everything democracy will require you to think globally even if,
like most of us, most of your actions have to be local.

It leaps to the
eye that your current political leaders are impressively equal to the challenges
they so clearly perceive and so eloquently describe. My observation of your
substantive leadership is naturally limited, but I know Dr. Swaminathan well
enough to guess that any government which takes him seriously is serious in
tackling the huge and crucial task of building a knowledge-based economy that
includes the farmers and villages as well as the higher-tech towns and cities.

The essence of
leadership is a compelling vision, so the need is for visionary leaders that
take people into their confidence and help them become aware and take advantage
of their entitlements and opportunities. The rapid growth of “civil society”
in India is great good news; if development is to be achieved (as the
President told us) “through information access to all stakeholders,” a wide
variety of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) is essential to mediate between
the vision projected by the government and the myriad make-it-happen actions
that have to be carried out by people who understand the vision but can also
make it work in local contexts they better understand.

So the elements
of success are patently present. Information and communication technology can
be, and should be, pervasive -- and its applications need to change constantly
as the restless ICT environment keeps changing. There is in India, I am
assured but I also observe, “no dearth of talent, brains, imagination, and
vigor.” It’s an excellent augury for dynamic yet inclusive development.

The inspiration
is here, too. I have seen it in the way Dr. Swaminathan works, and talks
about working. “Consultation” is a word frequently on his lips. So are
“inclusion,” “equity,” and “connectivity.” In his mind, as revealed in his
actions, everything really is related to everything else. The notion of a
“total systems approach,” so far from most people’s way of thinking, seems
natural to his genetic makeup.

If
inspirational leadership with these attributes is in India’s horoscope, I can
only say, with enthusiasm, “Congratulations, India!”

NOTE: On November 22, 2004, at the conclusion of
the New Delhi symposium on “Uncommon Opportunities,” I was asked to make a
summary comment. Afterwards I was asked to “reconstruct what I had said ex
tempore, as a written text. This writing, in the first week of
December, goes somewhat beyond what I said at the time.

Harlan Cleveland,
an American political scientist and public executive, is Chairman of the
International Center on Peace and Development (USA). Its mission is to
follow up on, and further develop, concepts put forward in Uncommon
Opportunities: An Agenda for Peace and Equitable Development, the Report
of the International Commission on Peace and Food.